Mark Ritson dropped a piece in The Drum this week titled "The Crypto.com brand banked on being remembered. All without a 'why'." It went up days after Steven Kalifowitz, Crypto.com's CMO of nearly six years, announced his exit at the end of June. Ritson's verdict, in short: Crypto.com built the fastest-growing awareness curve in financial-services history, spent over a billion dollars doing it, and ended up with a brand that no one can complete the sentence "…and the reason I'd choose them is…" about.
He's right. I want to add the layer he can't see from the outside, because I held the CMO seat at two international exchanges during the years Crypto.com was running this experiment, and I have spent the last eighteen months building the succession-bridge product for exactly this moment.
What Ritson called correctly.
Awareness without a reason to exist is a balance-sheet hole, not a brand triumph. Ritson is one of the few brand academics who has consistently refused to treat salience as the terminal metric, and the Crypto.com case is the cleanest available demonstration. The F1 paddock, the LA arena, the UFC octagon, the Super Bowl spots, the Matt Damon ad — every one of those line items worked as a salience instrument. Awareness rose faster than any financial brand in modern memory. The hole is that the brand never installed a why. Ask a US retail investor today why they would pick Crypto.com over Coinbase or Kraken and you will get a recall, not a reason. Ask the same question about Coinbase and you will get "because they're public, regulated, and based in San Francisco." That is the gap Ritson is pointing at.
He is also right that the exit is not just a CMO departure. CEO Kris Marszalek framed Kalifowitz's move as the start of a "next chapter" — leaner, AI-native, less arena-dependent. That is the language of a board that already concluded the same thing Ritson did, and is staffing accordingly.
What he can't see from outside.
There are three things I want to add that you can only see if you have sat inside the gate-stack of a regulated exchange, and they change what next should look like.
One: the brand without a why was a gate-stack choice, not a creative failure.
You cannot pick a sharp reason-to-exist when you are a Singapore-headquartered exchange selling to retail across forty-plus jurisdictions, half of which will only let you say a tightly restricted set of things about what your product even is. The fastest path through the consent-by-omission filter that the GFSC, the AFSA, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, the Cyprus regulator, and the various US state regulators created in 2021–2023 was: say less, be louder. A reason-to-exist statement strong enough to be brand equity is also strong enough to be a regulatory hook. The Coinbase "we are American and we are listed" line works because Coinbase confined the surface area to one jurisdiction and one product framing. Crypto.com chose the global surface area, and the global surface area refused to let any sentence be true everywhere. So the strategy converged on celebrity-plus-spectacle, because celebrity-plus-spectacle ports across jurisdictions with the lowest disclosure cost per market. That is not a brand-strategy failure. That is a perfectly rational compliance-anchored brand-strategy decision, made in 2021, fully consistent with the licence stack Crypto.com was building at the time.
Ritson cannot see this because he is reading the asset, not the brief.
Two: the "next chapter" cannot be a positioning exercise, because the positioning was never the bottleneck.
Whoever takes the seat from Kalifowitz will be tempted to do the obvious thing, which is to hire an agency, write a brand book, and announce a sharper reason-to-exist. That fails inside the same gate-stack that produced the first decision. A new positioning statement strong enough to fix the Ritson critique will not survive country counsel review in the next six jurisdictions where Crypto.com still wants to grow. The same compromise that flattened the brand the first time will flatten it the second time.
The actual operator job is upstream. It is the gate-stack itself: which markets matter for the next three years, which licence carve-outs are worth re-litigating with which regulator, which products are allowed to carry a sharper claim and which need to keep saying less. That work is done by someone who knows the inside of a CASP licence, has run the post-mortem when a regulator pulled a campaign, and has the standing to make recommendations that the CFO and the General Counsel will both sign. It is not a CMO appointment. It is a CMO-plus-licensing-strategy appointment, and the market for that profile is roughly one hundred people on the planet.
Three: the AI pivot Marszalek mentioned has a specific operator shape, and it is not what most agencies are selling.
When a CEO says "we're going AI-native," the agency interpretation is: more AI tools, more personalization, more dynamic creative. The operator interpretation is: the marketing team's compliance review cycle becomes the bottleneck and AI gets pointed at the bottleneck. Compliance pre-review on every paid asset across forty jurisdictions. Risk-disclosure language auto-generated against the live policy stack. Country-specific landing-page variants assembled from a single master brief plus a jurisdictional rules engine. The brief-survival rate goes from 38% to 90%. That is what AI-native means inside an exchange. Crypto.com cutting headcount makes sense only if the team that is left has the operator-grade clarity to point AI at the gate-stack instead of at the creative surface. Pointing AI at the creative surface produces faster slop. Pointing AI at the gate-stack produces a marketing function that ships.
What this means for the rest of the market.
The Crypto.com situation is not anomalous. It is the leading edge of a cycle. Coinbase cut fourteen percent of staff on May 5, restructured into five layers and AI-native pods, and reported a $394M Q1 loss the same week. Crypto.com is repositioning itself away from sponsorship-heavy salience. The two largest US-facing crypto-exchange marketing organizations have publicly told the market within ten days that the $1B-marketing era is closing. Every Tier-2 exchange CMO is reading the same memo and the same Ritson piece, and the same conversation is starting at the Tuesday exec sync in Singapore, in Dubai, in Cayman, in Vilnius.
The question is not "who replaces Kalifowitz." The question is "what shape of marketing function ships under MiCA, post-bull-cycle, with one-third the headcount, and a brand that still has to mean something." That shape is mostly drawn already. I drew a version of it. So have a few others.
If you are the board hiring next, the brief Ritson is asking you to solve is the one above, not the one in the press release.
— Jukka Blomberg, Helsinki, 12 May 2026
— Jukka Blomberg held the CMO seat at two international crypto exchanges before founding NorthPoint. He writes about exchange-grade marketing, MiCA, and what the post-bull-cycle exchange-CMO function actually looks like, at northpoint.fi.
Canonical: https://northpoint.fi/resources/writing/ritson-is-right-about-crypto-com
Top comments (0)